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My father was for some years during my youth a traveling salesman, employed for a time by one of the companies advertising its products in this post. Somewhere in the ruins here there's still one relic of those years, his case of samples.

These images thus bring back curious recollections. I accompanied him on a few trips. Waiting in the car on a baking dusty tall corn Iowa afternoon outside the John Deere plant, him inside trying to get orders for cardboard boxes. The intrinsic ignominy of the toil involved at the low end of the business of the purveying of Product.

You can bet Salvador Dali came top dollar, on the other hand. The top image here, a lovely piece of capitalist religious art.

Yes, descending that ladder of values and value, as on a spiral staircase. The tougher, more "realistic" attitude of the comic artists captures the lower levels of that psyche, that order. The appeal to class and then, as if on a corkscrewing ramp beneath, descending, the appeal to sex.

Perhaps prescient in its comic vision is Rube Goldberg's mechano universe of horrors.

"... and she shakes her head 'Yes'..." -- even while being throttled by the mechanical arm.

Notwithstanding the front-end message (Save GAS for WAR!) Goldberg is being a subversive here. He has seen the Future, and it is a Data Center flipping its wig.

Currently intermittently teetotal, I tossed and turned last night before finally descending into "I dreamed I ___ in my Maidenform bra" territory, which often happens on nights like this. (As you might imagine, the actual content of my dreams is disturbingly personal and usually dark and sad; it is the visual style and sometimes the language I hear that is redolent of these ads.) So I greet this trove of material a little less cynically than some people might and maybe I should. I love the way they look and they prompt a kind of rare happy nostalgia in me – great and intense memories of looking though magazines for hours in our basement den when I was very young and fantasy-joining the people on the pages in their various activities. Currently, I travel to Barnes & Noble once a week to check out the magazines and, as you know, they're mostly a sorry lot -- skinny, ugly things printed on terrible quality paper. Newsweek, by the end of its run, was simply ghastly to look at and horrible to touch. I really love the sexy Barbasol ad with the two women in lingerie and have always pondered the question: “what do women think of me?” I mean – who doesn’t? And my daughter started drawing Rube Goldberg-type machines when she was very young -- the product of a logical, engineering-type mind. Thanks for this. Curtis

We sell diamonds and misogyny and smart phones and smart bras and smart bombs back-to-back, as slick as you please. Product. Move the merch. Art and advertising help make the lie seem true. Quantify the eyeballs-to-message-time and sell it. The art of the sale. Lewis Mumford said the only two forms of consciousness possible to denizens of the modern industrial state were those of ‘the conditioners and the conditioned, the active and passive barbarians." Needless consumption has become necessary for survival: note the decision by Chinese officials to remove 250 million subsistence farmers to large cities, where they are expected to be bona fine consumers of said Product. Money mojo, to bloster GDP. You are hereby assigned the right to be sold anything. Profits über alles.

I'd watched that BBC documentary before. Fascinating. It left me with a hollow cold place in my chest, a feeling that we're always being toyed with, that reality is what's sold to us, that you have to take care. The lure of the material makes us easy marks.

Pertinent comments all, giving rise to further thoughts, for which many thanks.

According to Adam Curtis's reading of the Bernays application of Freud's pleasure principle to modern public relations and advertising, that state to which Curtis R alludes -- restless pre-sleep tossing and turning, inchoate thought and brink-of-oneiric maidenform ideation -- is the fertile soil in which appetite for product is planted.

We can't help it. Our brains are made that way. Easy targets. And of course it can be a pleasant business, in the target-acquisition phase.

The Curtis series is one of those works that forever affects your view of its subject.

A 2002 pre-release review in The Observer by Tim Adams gives a fair account of the scope of the series.

"Sigmund Freud may have invented the Self, full of unspoken dreams and desires, in 1900, but it was his American nephew, Edward Bernays, who packaged it and put it on to the market. Suddenly, everyone wanted one. And, of course, no one wanted one that was quite the same as anyone else's.

"Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891, had worked at the end of the First World War as a propagandist for America, and after 1918 he decided to carry on in this role. But he invented a brand new name for for his profession: public relations. He later turns up throughout the century - he lived to be 103 - as a kind of Zelig, shaping the American mind, with clients including Presidents Coolidge, Wilson, Hoover and Eisenhower, as well as Thomas Edison, Caruso, Nijinsky, scores of the largest corporations and many foreign governments. But his great genius was to first sell Uncle Siggy's ideas of the unruly subconscious to the American public and to American business.

"Bernays brought his uncle's books to America, found a publisher for them and discovered ingenious ways to advance the significance of their ideas in the mainstream press. He believed, like his uncle, that man was controlled by his irrational desires; he also saw that by applying the principles of psychoanalysis, these desires might be controlled and manipulated on a vast scale, for power and profit.

"Bernays was among the first to understand that one of the implications of the subconscious mind was that it could be appealed to in order to sell products and ideas. You no longer had to offer people what they needed; by linking your brand with their deeper hopes and fears, you could persuade them to buy what they dreamt of. Equipped with our subconscious wish-lists, we could go shopping for the life we had seen portrayed in the adverts.

"Happily, as Bernays realised, Uncle Siggy's creation - the great lasting invention of the twentieth century - arrived at a time when business, and American business in particular, through the techniques of mass production, and planned obsolescence, was suddenly able to satisfy those shifting desires. Like those little Japanese dolls that get bought at Christmas, and need feeding and nurturing, he knew that the Self, once owned, would prove very expensive of attention.

"It required all sorts of therapies and counselling, but most of all it needed to express itself - and one day it might want to express itself in one way, and the next it might want to do it in another. It was fickle, the Self, a follower of whim and fashion, and its only constant seemed to be that urgent aggressive fact of wanting.

"So, in Bernays's future, you didn't buy a new car because the old one had burnt out; you bought a more modern one to increase your Self-esteem, or a more low slung one to enhance your sense of your sex-appeal. You didn't choose a pair of running shoes for comfort or practicality; you did so because somewhere deep inside you, you felt they might liberate you to 'Just Do It'. And you didn't vote for a political party out of duty, or because you believed it had the best policies to advance the common good; you did so because of a secret feeling that it offered you the most likely opportunity to promote and express your Self. 'Our people,' said Herbert Hoover, 'have been transformed into constantly moving happiness machines.'"

Of course, magazine ads wouldn't have been so effective had they not been so well done.

As it happens, a few years ago somebody dumped off a load of unwanted old Life magazines outside the local branch library. The library won't take donations, so in effect the magazines were simply awaiting garbage collection. But as that source happens to be our defacto bookshop, the magazines ended up here. I've been enjoying them for years. Brilliant stuff, the great large b&w photo spreads by top-notch photojournalists, the wonderful ad art done by skilled professional illustrators. There is no site on the internet that's half so much fun as the real thing used to be.

Of course Adam Curtis is right. We were being brainwashed. The media power had a window directly into our souls.

But if my soul is going to peeped upon, I'd prefer that it be through a window. Because the current "back door" procedure is far less pleasurable.

I agree with you, of course, about the "back door" vs. "window" differentiation.

But it's interesting that people's receptivity to these ads varies greatly.

I've found that I'm pretty much unaffected by advertising in terms of items I purchase. Since many ads are targeted towards household products, I find that the products I actually buy are the ones my mother bought. I guess the ads of her era did their work unless she bought the products her own mother bought.

I do like seeing old tv ads on video and hearing radio versions of them on the Radio Classics satellite radio channel, but that's pure nostalgia for the jingles, etc., or the entertainment programs they bookended.

What offends me today is the propaganda advertising purchased at enormous taxpayer cost by our government supporting their programs. Obviously, the latest example is the Obamacare bombardment, which comes in a number of surreptitious guises.

The reason I buy Hello! magazine, the British weekly, isn't simply that I'm a superficial person in love with celebrity. I don't think I am, actually. I like the fact that it's still published in Life magazine format, features decent photography, fairly decent paper, and that to me it's basically a work of illustrated fiction, i.e., most of the celebrities they depict are completely unknown to me. So it's a relaxing imaginative exercise. Also, they publish some good recipes which are truly aimed at the busy, but slightly ambitious, home cook who doesn't have daily access to caviar and foie gras. It's a silly magazine in its way, but very well assembled and edited and often extremely (if unintentionally) funny. Shortly after Prince William married Kate Middleton, they devoted a few pages to the Buckingham Palace exhibition of Royal Wedding memorabilia, including Kate's dress presented on a life-sized dummy. As Hello! recorded it, both visually and in text, the Queen apparently told Kate that she thought the sight of the dress on the sightless mannequin was simply ghastly and the look on HRH's face told the story perfectly. You can't capture that properly in small format presentation and I call that good journalism.